All Resistance Magically Morphs into Al-Qaeda

The most astonishing instances of mindless, pro-government “reporting” yet: It’s a curious thing that, over the past 10 - 12 days, the news from Iraq refers to the combatants there as “al-Qaeda” fighters. When did that happen?

Until a few days ago, the combatants in Iraq were “insurgents” or they were referred to as “Sunni” or “Shia” fighters in the Iraq Civil War. Suddenly, without evidence, without proof, without any semblance of fact, the US military command is referring to these combatants as “al-Qaeda”.

Welcome to the latest in Iraq propaganda.

That the Bush administration, and specifically its military commanders, decided to begin using the term “Al Qaeda” to designate “anyone and everyone we fight against or kill in Iraq” is obvious. All of a sudden, every time one of the top military commanders describes our latest operations or quantifies how many we killed, the enemy is referred to, almost exclusively now, as “Al Qaeda.”

But what is even more notable is that the establishment press has followed right along, just as enthusiastically. I don’t think the New York Times has published a story about Iraq in the last two weeks without stating that we are killing “Al Qaeda fighters,” capturing “Al Qaeda leaders,” and every new operation is against “Al Qaeda.”

The Times — typically in the form of the gullible and always-government-trusting “reporting” of Michael Gordon, though not only — makes this claim over and over, as prominently as possible, often without the slightest questioning, qualification, or doubt. If your only news about Iraq came from The New York Times, you would think that the war in Iraq is now indistinguishable from the initial stage of the war in Afghanistan — that we are there fighting against the people who hijacked those planes and flew them into our buildings: “Al Qaeda.” [...]

Source: Salon

Evidence found proves Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah organization are traitors

The CIA and Fatah; Spies, Quislings and the Palestinian Authority By Mike Whitney

06/20/07 “ICH” — - When Hamas gunmen stormed the Fatah security compounds in Gaza last week they found huge supplies of American-made weaponry including 7,400 M-16 assault rifles, dozens of mounted machine guns, rocket launchers, 7 armored military jeeps, 800,000 rounds of bullets and 18 US-made armored personnel carriers. They also discovered something far more valuable— CIA files which purportedly contain “information about the collaboration between Fatah and the Israeli and American security organizations; CIA methods on how to prevent attacks, chase and follow after cells of Hamas and the Committees; plans about Fatah assassinations of members of Hamas and other organizations; and American studies on the security situation in Gaza.” (Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily.com)

If the documents prove to be authentic, they will confirm what many critics of Fatah believed from the beginning; that US-Israeli intelligence agencies have been collaborating with high-ranking members of the PA to help crush the Palestinian national liberation movement. The information could be disastrous for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his newly-appointed “emergency government”. It could destroy their credibility before they even take office.

The extent of Fatah’s cooperation with the CIA is still unknown, but an article in The New York Sun, (“Hamas Takes over Gaza Security Services” 6-15-07) suggests that the two groups may have been working together closely. Former Middle East CIA operations officer Robert Baer, who was interviewed in the article, said that the discovery of the documents was “a major blow to Fatah” and will show “a record of training, spying on Hamas”.

Baer added ironically, “Fatah equals CIA is not a good selling point.”

Baer is right. The uncovering of the documents is “big trouble” for Abbas who is already facing a loss of public confidence from his closeness to Israel and for his appointment of Salam Fayyad, the ex-World bank official who the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz calls “everyone’s favorite Palestinian.”

Perhaps more significant is the fact that members of Hamas who spoke with WorldNetDaily claimed that “the files contain, among other information, details of CIA networks in the Middle East” and that Hamas plans to “use these documents and make portions public to prove the collaboration between America and traitor Arab countries.” Imagine what a headache it will be for the Bush administration if Hamas exposes the broader network of US spies and Arab quislings operating throughout region.  More

Palestine - Not For Sale

Palestinians won’t accept a Vichy government

By Khalid Amayreh

06/18/07 “ICH” — – - Occupied Jerusalem, 17 June 2007 — -The vast bulk of Palestinians, at home and in the Diaspora, will not accept a quisling government in Ramallah that might be at Israel’s beck and call. This is precisely what the Bush administration and Israel expect the new government, headed by Salam Fayyad, to be.
Of course, it is entirely up to Fayyad and his cabinet to prove the falseness of Israeli bedding and American expectations.

Unfortunately, the new government seems to offer a little promise for a better tomorrow for the thoroughly starved, exhausted and tormented Palestinians.

Indeed, the deafening silence by Abbas and Fayyad, et al, in the face of widespread thuggish behavior by well-known armed hooligans who have been vandalizing and burning down buildings, institutions and businesses throughout the West Bank, is very telling.

True, the government is still a few hours’ old. However, the absence of even a verbal condemnation of the orgy of terror and vandalism against suspected Hamas supporters and their families and businesses doesn’t augur well for the future.

Predictably, the US and Israel have been heaping wholesome praise on the Fayyad government. Moreover, the US and Israel have already signaled their enthusiastic willingness to lift all financial sanctions against the occupied West Bank, apparently to strengthen the Dahlan-Abbas camp against other Palestinians who refuse to be bribed or intimidated into giving in to Israeli insolence and arrogance of power.

The Fayyad Government may be temporarily pleased by the American and Israeli support. However, it should understand that American and Israeli backing is like a poisoned chalice.

Experience proved that in the Middle East any government or faction or organization backed by the US will be reviled by the masses. This is especially true in the occupied Palestinian territories where collaboration with Israel, which controls America’s politics and policies, is seen as ultimate treason.

The Palestinian masses know very well what the US symbolize for them, their children and their enduring cause. It symbolizes oppression in its ugliest forms. It symbolizes mass murder, land theft, dispossession, deprivation and ultimate mendacity and hypocrisy. America is the enabler, sustainer and justifier of 40 years of Israeli Nazism whose ultimate goal is the obliteration of Palestinians as a nation, by arrogating their homeland for them and making their future as precarious as possible.

In short, America to the Palestinians is very much like what Nazi Germany was to the Jews. Hence, any government agreeing to throw itself into the American lap will lose its legitimacy if not its very existence. This is probably the reason why Palestinians in the Gaza Strip didn’t fight for Muhammed Dahlan and his men.

During the past 18 months, the US, through people like Keith Dayton, gave us a lot of money and weapons to kill each other in the service of Israel, which doesn’t really distinguish between this or that Palestinian group, as long as they reject the occupation and insist on freedom.

That happened while the US and Israel (and also the hypocritical EU governments) made sure to starve and impoverish ordinary Palestinians in the hope that they would revolt against Hamas and abandon Palestinian aspirations, in return for bread and American money.

Yes, America gave us weapons to kill each other, while making sure to starve and torment us, as if the Nazis of our time wanted us to kill and be killed hungry.

These are not allegations or unsubstantiated claims but well-known facts. US officials and media have been openly speaking about igniting civil war in Gaza and the West Bank. Elliot Abrams, who is answerable to AIPAC, even boasted about his success in setting Palestinians against each other.

Unfortunately, President Abbas never bothered to tell the Palestinian people why and for what purpose he was amassing all these American-supplied weapons? Was it because he wanted to fight the Israeli occupation? Or was it to decapitate Hamas in one full swoop when the opportunity arose? And if the latter was the reason, then can we say that Hamas was justified in its preemptive action in Gaza?

Honest Palestinians knew from the very inception what was going on. The writing was on the wall for a long time, and the national apostasy on the part of certain Palestinian leaders was getting starker and starker.

There is no doubt that any close identification of the new government with the Israeli occupier will invite its demise, and that could happen sooner rather than later.

More to the point, it is wrong and misleading to assume that the Fatah movement in its entirety would back a government that says “yes” to Israel and the US.

A government as such would be a treacherous government, a quisling entity.

Therefore, the new government should watch its steps very carefully and refrain from reaching any agreement with the Zionist regime that could compromise our national rights.

This is not a matter of Fatah vs. Hamas. This is a matter of Palestine and Palestine is not for sale.

Summary of the West’s hypocrisy and support for corrupt criminal regimes

Welcome to ‘Palestine’

By Robert Fisk

06/16/07 “The Independent” — – How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today “Palestine” - and let’s keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.

Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn’t like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement.

No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of “Palestine” still left to negotiate over ?

And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the “moderate” (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word “occupation”, who always referred to Israeli “redeployment” rather than “withdrawal”, a “leader” we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn’t vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas’s bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas’s Fatah and the rotten nature of the “Palestinian Authority”.

I recall years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official whose walls had just been punctured by an Israeli tank shell. All true. But what struck me were the gold-plated taps in his bathroom. Those taps - or variations of them - were what cost Fatah its election. Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer “Palestine” EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people?

All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our “war on terror” in the wastelands of Helmand province).

We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal.

We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair’s recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a “statesman” by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose “democracy” is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the “war on terror”.

Yes, and we love King Abdullah’s unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn’t like The Independent’s coverage of what he quaintly calls “the Middle East”. If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the “Middle East” would be to control.

For that is what it is about - control - and that is why we hold out, and withdraw, favours from their leaders. Now Gaza belongs to Hamas, what will our own elected leaders do? Will our pontificators in the EU, the UN, Washington and Moscow now have to talk to these wretched, ungrateful people (fear not, for they will not be able to shake hands) or will they have to acknowledge the West Bank version of Palestine (Abbas, the safe pair of hands) while ignoring the elected, militarily successful Hamas in Gaza?

It’s easy, of course, to call down a curse on both their houses. But that’s what we say about the whole Middle East. If only Bashar al-Assad wasn’t President of Syria (heaven knows what the alternative would be) or if the cracked President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wasn’t in control of Iran (even if he doesn’t actually know one end of a nuclear missile from the other).

If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don’t behave like us civilised Westerners.

So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don’t deserve our sacrifice and our love.

How do we deal with a coup d’état by an elected government?

The threat to al-Jazeera

George Galloway
Friday June 15, 2007
The Guardian

Since its launch just over a decade ago, the al-Jazeera satellite TV station has transformed the politics of the Middle East. For the first time, people in the region had access to a genuinely free and independent source of news and comment that was neither under the control of dictatorial regimes nor western states or corporations. Under its slogan of “The opinion … and the other opinion”, al-Jazeera gave an Arab world hungry for information and debate the means to talk to itself and shape its future. It spawned imitators across the region and has launched an English language station that is beginning to challenge the western monopoly of international news as a “voice of the global south”. And the station also put Qatar, which sponsors it, on the political map and gave it unprecedented prestige throughout the Arab world and beyond.

But now that achievement is being put at risk. The evidence is clear that the US government is using its influence in Qatar to try to neuter the station’s independence, bring it to heel and shift its coverage in a pro-western direction. If it succeeds, it would be a disaster for the Arab world and its chance to shape an independent and democratic future.

When al-Jazeera was launched in 1996, it was hailed by the US as a brave step towards liberalisation of the Middle Eastern media. But that all changed after September 2001 and the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The US administration could not tolerate a TV station that was popular and trusted in the Arab and Muslim world broadcasting about the reality of western and Israeli policies on the ground - and giving airtime to their enemies. Although US and Israeli viewpoints have always been given plenty of airtime, the freedom enjoyed by al-Jazeera’s editorial staff has clearly been too liberal and democratic for the world’s “leading democracy”. Meanwhile, dictatorial regimes in the region pressed Washington to do something about this “turbulent priest” they believed was stirring their peoples against their despotic rule.

Initially, al-Jazeera had forced other channels in the Arab world to open up their coverage. But the new freedoms were not tolerated for long. And although the US government launched its own Arabic news channel al-Hurra, and Saudi Arabia al-Arabiya, neither succeeded in denting al-Jazeera’s popularity.

But the station has had to pay a high price for its independence and professionalism. Its offices in Kabul and Baghdad were bombed by the US; its Baghdad correspondent Tariq Ayyub was killed; its Kabul correspondent Taysir Alluni was arrested in Spain and charged with terrorism; and its cameraman Sami Alhajj was kidnapped in Kabul and continues to be held in Guantánamo Bay. Most notoriously of all, George Bush even suggested to Tony Blair that they bomb al-Jazeera’s Doha headquarters.

Now the US, which maintains a large military base in Qatar, has adopted a more subtle approach to breaking the Arabs’ voice of independence and diversity. And the signs are that some elements in the Qatari government have yielded to the relentless US pressure. As one source close to al-Jazeera has put it: “You don’t need to bomb a TV station to change its direction.” A recent reshuffle has brought outspokenly pro-US directors on to the board, including a former Qatari ambassador to Washington. Another has boasted publicly that the tone and content of al-Jazeera’s coverage is going to be changed. But these moves have already backfired and caused huge controversy not only in Qatar but throughout the Middle East, and there is every chance that what is in effect an attempted coup at the station will be reversed. It would be a huge loss for independence and freedom in the Arab world if it succeeded.

Boys murdered by Israeli troops while playing on beach in Gaza

Boys shot dead at Gaza beach

Two 13-year-old boys were shot dead, and another boy shot in the back, by Israeli forces after they took a swim near a beach in Beit Lahiya on Friday.

The boys, from Jabaliya’s refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, planned to visit the beach near Beit Lahiya to fly kites. 

Israeli soldiers took the boy who was shot in the back for treatment inside Israel.

They dropped him back to northern Gaza, where Palestinian paramedics picked him up.  

The summer vacation period has begun for schoolchildren in Gaza. With limited recreational choices, the beach near Beit Lahiya has become a destination of choice for children in the Jabaliya refugee camp.

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Source: Al Jazeera

At least 78,000 innocent Iraqis have been killed by U.S. airstrikes

By Sherwood Ross

06/01/07 “Counterpunch” — - -An estimated 78,000 Iraqis were killed by U.S. and Coalition air strikes from the start of the war through June of last year, an article in “The Nation” magazine says.

The estimate is based on the supposition that 13 percent of the 601,000 Iraqis who met violent deaths reported by The Lancet study released last October “had been killed by bomb, missile, rocket or cannon up to last June,” author Nick Turse writes in the June 11th issue of the weekly magazine.

“There are indications that the air war has taken an especially grievous toll on Iraqi children,” Turse said.

“Figures provided by the Lancet study suggest that 50 percent of all violent deaths of Iraqi children under 15 in that same period (March 2003 through June 2006) were due to coalition airstrikes.”

Since April, 2003, Turse reports, the U.S. has dropped at least 59,787 pounds of cluster bombs in Iraq, a type of weapon Human Rights Watch(HRW) termed “the single greatest risk civilians face with regard to a current weapon that is in use.”

The author notes cluster bombs have “a high failure rate” so that unexploded bomblets that fall to ground become, in fact, landmines which, Marc Garlasco of HRW points out, are “already banned by most nations.”

Garlasco, the HRW senior military analyst, says, “I don’t see how any use of the current U.S. cluster-bomb arsenal in proximity to civilian objects can be defended in any way as being legal or legitimate.”

At a time when many nations are moving toward banning cluster munitions, the U.S. China, Israel, Pakistan and Russia are opposing new limits of any kind. At a conference in Oslo last February, 46 of 48 governments supported an international ban on cluster bombs by 2008.

The cluster bomb bursts above ground and releases hundreds of smaller “bomblets” that create a kill radius about the size of a football field, shredding virtually every object in the zone.

Aside from these deadly devices, Air Force officials acknowledge Coalition aircraft dropped at least 111,000 pounds of other types of bombs in Iraq last year as part of 10,519 “close air support missions,” author Turse said.

According to Les Roberts, co-author of two surveys of mortality in Iraq published in the British medical journal The Lancet, “Rocket and cannon fire could account for most coalition-attributed civilian deaths.” The magazine quotes him further as stating, “I find it disturbing that they (Pentagon) will not release this (figure), but even more disturbing that they have not released such information to Congressmen who have requested it.”

Turse’s article is titled, “The Secret Air War in Iraq,” and alleges “The devastation from U.S. bombing is underreported—and may be increasing.” He writes, “That an occupying power regularly conducts airstrikes in or near dense population centers should have raised serious concerns in the mainstream media, unfortunately, reports on the air war are sparse and mostly confined to regurgitations of military announcements.”

“..Until reporters begin bypassing official U.S. military pronouncements and locating Iraqi sources, we will remain largely in the dark regarding the secret and deadly U.S. air war in Iraq,” Turse concludes.